Australia is so ridiculously huge that even the relatively tiny fraction that’s amenable to crops is still one of the world’s biggest. Only 4% of its land is arable and that still means it has the 10th largest arable area of any country (ten times more arable land than Taiwan has any kind of land)
Let’s be honest, taking other countries’ culinary traditions and doing them wrong is our culinary tradition
Well it is. But that’s the point
Your cat example works because it shows an example that is ambiguous in English but not in German. Zezhin’s example was showing something that wasn’t ambiguous in English, a language with no noun class distinctions outside of referring to things by their actual gender, so there’s no benefit to having more general noun classes in that example
Pretty sure that OP is referring to noun class systems. English doesn’t use one, but most other European languages do and English used to. Like German’s three equivalents to English’s “the”: der, die, and das, which German changes depending on the noun class (“grammatical gender”) of the noun in question regardless of its actual gender or whether it even has one
These bits of grammar don’t always actually communicate any extra information about anything other than the grammar of the language you’re speaking, though. The “gender” of the thing in question can’t reliably be distinguished from grammar since even in the Indo-European languages where the noun classes are typically thought of as masculine or feminine, the word’s grammatical gender can contradict its actual gender. The Old English word for “woman”, back when English had grammatical gender, was masculine.
While I don’t actually know a goddamn thing about the history of this, that doesn’t seem to work too well once you look at more languages. While a male/female or male/female/neuter system is common in Indo-European languages, other language groups use versions that have more distinctions and haven’t traditionally been associated with gender. Most languages in the Atlantic-Congo group that a lot of the southern half of Africa speaks have between ten and twenty different categories of noun in that sense. That’s why they’re more formally called “noun classes” rather than “grammatical genders”
Shout out to when Volkswagen did the Golf with every panel painted a different bright colour https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/36/VWGolfHarlequin_%28cropped%29.JPG/800px-VWGolfHarlequin_%28cropped%29.JPG
Alright my plans for the evening got cancelled so I decided to have a go at working this out. Methodology, a term I am using somewhat loosely, was to go down wikipedia’s list of largest empires, ignore each one that was already completely covered (the four big caliphates and several Chinese dynasties in particular), then take their peak territory from Geacron. Geacron isn’t an ideal source here, not least because the only way to “export” from it without paying money is print screen, but it’s good enough for these purposes. I also didn’t bother filling in the entire map because a couple of places were basically just going to come down to whichever country had them today due to how difficult to conquer they have historically been. Priority in overlaps is given to the larger empire. The result is this: https://i.imgur.com/kLNjpSm.png
On here we have:
This list leaves Western Sahara, Liberia, Sweden, Slovakia, Nepal, Bhutan, Papua New Guinea, and Antarctica for a total of 25 countries (or maybe 27 if you add Norway and Chile for maximum Antarctic coverage. I suppose you could also argue that the Treaty of Torsedillas granted half of Antarctica each to Spain and Portugal, not that either ever actually controlled it). Possibly also some islands, especially in the Pacific, but the map isn’t in a high enough resolution to tell. The most contested areas are the Levant and Central Asia. Some big empires that aren’t on the list include every Persian empire, the Ottomans, and Alexander’s empire.
Please, nobody look at my combined hours played on those games
I feel like overlaps should be allowed otherwise certain regions (Iraq and its surroundings come to mind) will make it impossible
I kinda want to see what the fewest countries you could cover the whole world with is if you took everything at its historical peak territory. So like post-WW1 British empire, Mongol empire just before Chinggis died, Umayyad caliphate when it stretched from Iran to Spain, Roman Empire under Trajan etc etc. How many do we need to fill in the whole map? And what’s the smallest country that we need in order to do so?
No luck, unfortunately. It appears that little to no fermentation took place; I still just have some water sweetened with honey. There has been a lot of heavy rain recently, so I suppose it’s quite possible that too much wild yeast had been washed off by that
I assume this is a reference to the various ethnic groups in the Congo Basin who are notably shorter on average than most humans, such as the Batwa and Bambuti. The different groups are often collectively referred to as “Pygmy peoples”, but I don’t feel super great about the way that sounds
have no hope of recovery
Good news, people can recover from homelessness
It’s isinglass rather that sulphites that makes a lot of beer and wine non-vegan. It’s a type of collagen made from certain fish (not usually crustaceans, so far as I know) that makes the yeast suspended in the liquid sink and coalesce into a sediment that can be removed. If you try homebrewing you’ll find that your own produce is hazy unless you use isinglass, although it doesn’t significantly change the taste
There’s someone in these comments claiming that they have orange juice with their coffee, so I’m willing to tolerate uphillbothways’ bullshit at least until that war criminal is dealt with
The pseudo-espresso that you can take camping? Anarcho-primitivism for sure
Volume is not mass, and neither of them is weight. A gram is strictly speaking a measure of mass, and we just consider it to be a unit of weight in casual terms because the only frame of reference the vast majority of us have has reasonably constant gravity so we conflate mass and weight. That you can sort of use grams to measure volume is literally only because the density of common stuff (especially water) is close enough for most purposes. It’s kinda like measuring a distance in units of time so long as the method of travel is known. I can say “an hour’s walk” and I’m not really measuring distance there but you know roughly how far I mean
I’ve been playing Paradox games, so I’m probably going straight to the Hague and deserving it